Raymond Carver Quotes

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly.

One of the other reasons for writing this book [My Beloved World] was to hold on to the person you first met. More of the world knows about me now and follows me in a way that never happened before. I didn't want me, the inside of me, to change. Because I liked Sonia, the Sonia who has been. So another reason for writing the book was to hold on to that - whatever the best in Sonia was, to try to capture it.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

I write from my life, my experience. I'm selfish that way.

All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.

It is important to express oneself... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.

We write about ourselves because we know about ourselves.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.

Everything I've written has been personal and touched on things that I needed to deal with in my personal life. So I just feel that writing is great therapy, and the best writing comes from truth, and so I mine my life constantly for that.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

All my songs come from me because I only seem able to write about myself and my experiences.

It's so easy for me to do a boy-bashing pop song, but to sit down and write honestly about something that's really close to me, something I've been through, it's a totally different thing.

I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

I think that I write about stuff that others don't write about. I don't have a bunch of love songs cuz I don't really have much boy experience. I just write about what I am actually going through in my real life.

You need to write about something that you really know about or you deeply connect with. Don't fake it.

I do always write from a personal place.

I used to say it was painful to write lyrics about myself and looking inward.

Do stuff that is true to your own experiences.

I say it's easier to write for other people than write for myself.

I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

Be yourself. Be true to that, to your heart. Patience. See what happens if you step back instead of bounding forward.

We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.